Oddities in buying eBooks

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by tts52

On my iPad I have eReader, iPad Books, Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and Nook. When I buy a book I sometimes check all of the sites and invariably all have the exact same price. Are eBooks a cartel--there seems to be no competition.

Five of the biggest publishers decided (from April 2010) that they would no longer sell ebooks to retailers for the retailers to sell to the public, but that they would require any retailer of their ebooks to instead act only as their agent in the sale, selling the ebook only at the price set by the publisher, with the retailer taking a fixed percentage (30%) of the retail price as an agent fee.

So yes, a book from any of those five publishers will be at the same price at all ebook stores.

This isn't a cartel. The publishers haven't colluded and said "all first released mystery novels will sell at $12.99 as an ebook". They each set their own prices for the books they sell.

The publishers (and imprints) who have agency agreements for ebooks are:
Hachette (Grand Central, Little Brown, Faith Words, Windblown, Orbit, Center Street, Yen Press)
HarperCollins (Amistad, Avon, Caedmon, Ecco, Eos, Harper, ItBooks, Rayo, William Morrow)
Macmillan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, FSG, Hill & Wang, Faber & Faber, First Second, Henry Holt & Co., Metropolitan Books, Times Books, Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Picador, Quick and Dirty Tips, Scientific American, St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books, Thomas Dunne Books, Tor/Forge, Orb Books)
Penguin (Penguin, Ace, Alpha, Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, Avery, Berkley, Dial, Dutton, Firebird, Frederick Warne, Gotham, Putnam, Grosset & Dunlap, HP, Hudson Street, Jove, NAL, Pamela Dorman Books, Perigree, Philomel, Plume, Portfolio, Prentice Hall, Price Stern Sloan, Puffin, Razorbill, Riverhead, Sentinel, Speak, Tarcher, Viking)
Simon & Schuster (Atria, Folger, Free Press, Gallery, Howard, Pocket, Scribner, Simon & Schuester, Threshold, Touchstone/Fireside)

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

This isn't a cartel. The publishers haven't colluded and said "all first released mystery novels will sell at $12.99 as an ebook". They each set their own prices for the books they sell.

How do you know that, pd? I'm not in the market for hot off the press books, so I haven't studied what's out there. But it is my impression from comments here that indeed the price of new best seller eBooks since the agency model began is the same regardless of publisher.

And thanks for that list of publishers! I hadn't seen it before.

[tts52]

So if there is no difference in price I will continue to buy on amazon. It has the added value of working on my Kindle. But I am surprised that Borders and Barnes & Noble aren't offering me any incentives to use them. I buy a lot of eBooks probably close to $100 a month(4 family members on same account). Is there some agreement that the emailed specials and coupons won't apply to eBooks?

[elcreative]

The agency model means that the online retailer isn't the owner/seller of the book and, as an agent, gets a fixed percentage to sell at a price set by the actual seller - the publisher.

With paper books, the retailer either buys the books on firm sale or SoR (Sale or Return) at a discounted price... they then actually own the books (well when they pay the invoice technically) and can decide what price they sell at and which titles get discounted heavily (also depending on how much they wish to compete)... the level of discount from the publisher is higher for firm sale and also affected by quantity which is why the big boys get a bigger cut than the independents.

Hopefully this may change in the future to allow easier discounting on eBooks for the retailer and more competition but, from a retail point of view, it has advantages for the retailer in that they know what they're going to get for every title and don't have to worry about price matching to compete with someone else using a title as a loss leader. It also allows better forward planning for a business to survive...

One of the reasons that so many independents have gone under, is so much heavy discounting... very nice for the customer (but a reduction in choice resulting from loss of outlets) but resulting in insane activities. When I ran a specialist SF&F bookshop, we should have had excellent sales from the Harry Potter books but with the supermarkets selling them as loss leaders at a lower price than we could buy from the publisher, they were basically a waste of time... with the fourth title, we didn't even order from the publisher just went round to Tescos and bought half a dozen for half the price we'd have paid the publisher... still didn't sell as we had to then add a small profit resulting in the copies we had going to regular customers who were collectors of 1st editions in the US. Even the majors were lucky if they did better than break even due to the loss leader activities of supermarkets. The only people who made any real money, from Harry Potter books, were the publishers and the author. Fine for them but tough on book retailers and nice for customers but they're the ones who bemoan lack of choice!